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“History teaches us many things. Most importantly, the things that made us who and what we are.” Robert Bonvill

When Jacob Roggeveen arrives on Easter Island he finds few trees, a couple of thousand people and nine hundred statues.

Both he and later Captain Cook surmise that there must have been a much larger population at one time to have built all these giant statues. The statues are lying on the ground in disarray and the natives ignore them.

The statues you see standing up now have been restored.

The story goes that at some point in the island’s history, the art and the increasing population were depleting the natural resources. There were too many trees being cut down. Without trees you have no canoes to get fish.There are no fishing nets to be made without the mulberry trees. Rats were overrunning the island and eating the seeds and fruit.

Speculation is that the people were starving, fighting and blamed their idols.

They threw them down or lay them down and started killing each other. There is evidence of cannibalism.

The natives that were there when the Europeans came, follow a Birdman Cult, Tangata-Manu. The Rano Kau area has been considered sacred since ancient times. It is here in the fifteenth or sixteenth century that the Orongo ceremonial village is built for the new order.

After the fall of the Moai carving era society, new gods replaced the old ones while a struggle for power came to light. In order to settle this in a non-violent way, the Birdman Cult competition was established to help decide who would lead the Rapa Nui each year. They competed in a yearly Hunger Games-style race to retrieve an egg from an island in shark-infested waters with many deaths. The supreme deity of the Birdman Cult was the fertility god Make-Make.

There are petroglyphs that show the fish, marine life and canoes near Papa Vaku. Many Birdman petroglyphs were found near the Orongo village.

Over the next 150 years the remaining Rapa Nui culture shrunk to 150 people due mostly to European diseases.

The fate of the Rapa Nui on Easter Island is often used to illustrate how humans destroy their communities with environmental destruction and warfare. They had a highly developed civilization for about six hundred years and then they destroyed the environment and it ended in catastrophe.

We don’t know what is true and what isn’t, but the Moai stand as a reminder of the demise of an ancient culture.

As we deplete our natural resources, do we go the way of the Rapa Nui or do we hold ourselves accountable for our global excess?

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”Mahatma Gandhi

As humans we tend to blame other people for our environmental problems. Most of the Amazon region is located in Brazil and having spent time there I have to talk about deforestation. Though each of us are responsible for creating the problem in the environment, caring for the Amazon is most critical for our survival.

The Amazon Rainforest is the largest remaining tropical forest on our planet. It is home to one-third of the world’s species; one-fourth of the world’s fresh water; one fifth of the world’s forests; forty-eight billion tons of carbon dioxide in its trees and two hundred indigenous and traditional communities.

The Amazon is also one of the fastest changing ecosystems, largely as a result of human activities, including deforestation, forest fires, and, increasingly, climate change.

The current deforestation is driven by industrial activities and large-scale agriculture. By the 2000s more than three-quarters of forest clearing in the Amazon was for cattle-ranching.Vast areas of rainforest were felled for cattle pasture and soy farms, drowned for dams, dug up for minerals, and bulldozed for towns and colonization projects. At the same time, the proliferation of roads opened inaccessible forests to settlement by poor farmers, illegal logging, and land speculators.

The Emilio Goeldi Museum is a research institute related to the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI). It was founded in 1866 in the city of Belém, in the state of Para.

Since its creation, the museum activities have been divided up between the scientific study of natural and socio-cultural systems in the Amazon area, scientific communication, the diffusion of knowledge and collections from the region and formation. All the results obtained in these fields make the Emilio Goeldi Museum one of the most important research centers in Brazil.

The museum is composed of three different places: a zoological and botanical park in the city of Belém, a research campus on the outskirts of the city and a scientific station in the Caxiuanã National Forest.

The Park has more than two thousand species of plants and around six hundred animals that are native to the Amazon region and seems to be a popular school trip.

Brazil is taking steps to save the Amazon rainforest.

Since 2004 there was a seventy per cent decline in deforestation. In 2012 Brazil’s forest code was updated for landowners to protect eighty per cent of the rainforest. Some countries followed but not many. Different Brazilian states had different outcomes. It is not a downward trend. In 2013 Para’s deforestation had doubled and in 2014 it was the lowest of the Brazilian states.

Greed, economy, state and government regulations seem to play a part in the reversal of the trend. The most obvious explanation was the change in national policy – first to sharply restrict deforestation, then to loosen the restrictions a bit.

Saving the environment requires all of us. We can’t expect the Brazilians to take care of it for us while we drive our cars or put chemicals in the air. It requires us all to be well informed citizens of the world. What is happening in the Amazon affects all of us and we should be aware of what is going there. We have one quest and we need to do it with compassion and not blame for each other. I believe that what we do makes a difference. I can only hope the rest of the world feels the same way.

Destruction is a man’s will, Prevention is also a man’s will. It’s a man’s choice to choose between Destruction and Prevention.” Babu Rajah

1. One person at a time. We are all just doing the best for ourselves, our families, our religions and our country. Billions of people all doing the best that they can for themselves are causing a lot of damage.

2. Lack of education and stupidity –believing what is told to you instead of checking it for yourself or refusing to be reached by logic, fact, or modern ideas. Many people in third world countries don’t have access to obvious and vital truths about public health, sexuality, nutrition, all religions and conservation.

3. We have exhausted our planet’s resources and polluted it beyond its capacity to clean itself. If we don’t change how we take care of the environment, it isn’t going to matter whether we blow ourselves off the face of the earth or not.

4. Fundamentalist religion. We are living in an age of renewed religious wars based on tribalism, religious fanatics, fear of “the others” and no value on human life.

5. Nuclear power plants are on the rise which leads to more nuclear weapons of mass destruction and catastrophic meltdowns.

6. Global deflation affects everyone. The affluent nations still have stuff but fewer jobs, worse health care, more stress and more debt. The struggling nations are much worse off. Everyone is angry.

7. New diseases and viruses are evolving that can “destroy humanity”. They are usually weird, come from Africa or Asia and are transmitted by animals to humans. All illnesses due to environmental toxins are on the rise.

8. I just googled can hate destroy the world to see what people had to say and I was directed to websites spouting hate rhetoric for every race, country and religion. If you want to hate someone, you will find a group on the internet who hates them also. So I would have to say yes and with our advanced social media we can spread hate faster than ever.

9. World War lll can happen with everyone having nuclear weapons and the belief that they are right.

I’m sure there are more. The future looks bad right now. I wish that when the new society arises, they will not look back and see that it was our human stupidity and selfishness that caused the destruction of most of the planet. I assume there will be a small part left and a peaceful, less complicated group of humans or somethings will thrive there. When they tell our civilization’s story, I want it to be that we cared and we tried our best to save it.